HOWTO In order to use tv_imdb, you need:

1. choose a directory location to use for the tv_imdb database (you'll need about 1/2 GB of free space),

2a. run 'tv_imdb --imdbdir <dir> --prepStage all --download' to download the list files from imdb.com. Or,

2b If you have a slow network connection you may prefer to omit the '--download' flag and be prompted for what you need to download by hand. See <http://www.imdb.com/interfaces> for the download sites. Then once you have the files rerun without '--download'.

Note: '--prepStage' sucks a bit of memeory, but you can run each prepStage separately by running --prepStage with each of the stages (see --help for details).

Feel free to report any problems with these steps to xmltv-devel@lists.sf.net.

BUGS

The '--prepStage' needs a lot of memory to run at a reasonable speed, over 200 megabytes with the current imdb data files. For there to be 200 megabytes free for tv_imdb, the system will need at least 256 megabytes of RAM. Running with less can take hours (or days!) - although fortunately this stage needs to be run only once after downloading the data files.

Could use a --configure step just like the grabbers so you do not have to specify the --imdbdir on the command line every time. Also this could step you through the prep stages with more description of what is being done and what is required. Configure could also control the number of actors to add (since some movies have an awful lot), currently we are adding the top 3.

How and what to look up needs to be option driven.

Needs some more controls for fine tuning ``close'' matches. For instance, currently it looks like the North America grabber only has date entries for movies, but the imdb.com data contains made for video movies as well as as real movies, ot is it's possible to get the wrong data to be inserted. In this case we may want to say ``ignore tv series'' and ``ignore tv mini series''. Along with this, we'd want to define what a ``close'' match is. For instance does a movie by the same title with a date out by 1 year or 2 years considered a match (currently we're using 2).

Nice to haves include: verification/addition of programe MPAA/VCHIP ratings, addition of imdb.com user ratings (by votes) to programes. Potenially we could expand to include ``country of origin'', ``description'', ``writer'' and ``producer'' credits, maybe even ``commentator''.

Heh, if the XMLTV.dtd supported it, we could even include urls to head shots of the actors :)